My Best Experience and Worst Experience in Art

I used to say that my best experience in art was in high school because I created works that I would say I was truly proud of, but now I don’t think that particular experience would be my best experience in art. Now I would consider the Block week course I took this semester, FINA 503 as my favourite arts experience. The class was very thoughtful and creative. In that course we had to see 4 live performances from the High Performance Rodeo, see some films, visit the Glenbow Museum, and learn some dance exercises. These activities enabled me to see art from a different perspective. The performances we saw were Tubular Bells which was a collaboration with these 4 world class pianists and Alberta Ballet, Grandstand which was a live band performance, Kawasaki Exit which was a love story and mystery regarding the dark side of social networking sites in Japan and a performance of our choice which I chose Freak show, which was a tour of the Epcor with a variety of performances. Tubular Bells was awesome except the ballet choreography wasn’t on par with the painists, Grandstand was alright, and Freak Show was pretty good. Kawasaki Exit however was amazing. First the actors were speaking Japanese with English Subtitles, then the act every thing out backwards in English with Japanese Subtitles. It was amazing to see the actors perform this, but it was the story rewinding that made little things that would’ve been missed in the first part, so significant!

I guess, being a Visual Fine Arts major, I learned so many things about the visual arts which was all very fascinating, but at the same time I never realized how limiting it was.
This idea started when last semester in my class with Rob Kelly. The class was for curriculum building and my Art Theory class with Paul Woodrow. Artists that we all hear about first started out with the visual medium and eventually go out to try other things. Creativity in art should not just be limited to visuals or sounds being segregated from each other. Rob Kelly advocating creativity is very inspirational. Also seeing Paul Woodrow integrated media projects which fuses visuals and sound to create an interactive environment also showed me that I was so limited to drawing, painting, and sculpture.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my best experience was in art as well as my worst experience. There are probably worse experiences that I’ve had in art. I could specify an event like my junior high art teacher who knew nothing of art and gave me a bad grade on a clay mask I made because it wasn’t colourful. I’m not just saying that, but she even told me herself. I agree with Rob Kelly when he says that CTS should be intergrated with the Art curriculum. I would’ve totally enjoyed being able to work with computers or woods and metals in my art classes. Not to say that I didn’t enjoy the “fine arts.” I just think that being able to learn these technologies and be able to incorporate them into an art work like in Paul Woodrow’s installation work would be pretty cool.